Jennifer Bartlett - House
American, b.1941
House, 2003
Portfolio of 25 screenprints, 14 x 14 inches
Edition 31/45
Brand X Projects
07.001a-y

Alumni Gift

Jennifer Bartlett is an internationally recognized painter and printmaker. Born and raised in California, Bartlett studied painting at Mills College in Oakland, California; and received her MFA from Yale. Bartlett moved to New York City, where for several years during the 1970s she taught at the School of Visual Arts. Her early style, rooted in Abstract Expressionism, soon gave way to grid-based compositions reminiscent of Minimalist and Conceptualist art. The artist, already noted for her subversive interpretations of these movements, made her mark on the New York art world in 1976, when she exhibited her first major piece, a monumental assemblage of 988 twelve by twelve inch painted steel plates entitled Rhapsody. When displayed, "Rhapsody" fills 153 running feet of wall space and reads like a piece of music or poem in a carefully planned rhythm and repetition of images.

Her early work, which was strictly limited to grids, graphs, and dots, evolved to include an expanded view of the possibilities of classifying and cataloging. By the late 1970s, figurative elements began to appear regularly in Bartlett's work. The artist's grid format became largely subsumed by expressive new landscape compositions, and during the early 1980s she commenced a series of lush images of pools and gardens. In recent years, she has returned to the grids and Abstract Expressionist elements of her early career while maintaining the intense, subjective quality of her work of the 1980s and 1990s. Recently she has created a set of works linked by the image of a square and triangle immediately identifiable as a house.